The November pogrom is known by Holocaust scholars as one of the most analyzed events in Nazi Germany. Descriptions of Kristallnacht usually emphasize the attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops, sometimes schools and other Jewish institutions, yet rarely the destructions of private homes. Based on contemporary administrative reports and letters as well as postwar survivor testimonies, my research suggests that during that night Goebbels presumably ordered systematic and nationwide violent attacks aimed at Jewish homes. The resulting mass destruction of Jewish homes and apartments has never been studied, neither in its scale, intensity nor its gravity. For some cities, between 75 and 90 per cent of the Jewish homes were reported as vandalized. After the attacks, thousands of homes were inhabitable, their windows broken and china, furniture, lamps and paintings smashed to pieces. Humiliations, beatings, murder and sexual violence accompanied the systematic vandalism. More than burned synagogues or vandalized shops, the systematic devastation of the last refuge of the German Jews, their homes, might explain, why so many German and Austrian Jews decided to flee or to commit suicide.
Wolf Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles since 2008 and is the Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research since 2014.
Gruner’s most recent book is The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses (Berghahn 2019) The original German version with Wallstein 2016 received the award for most outstanding German studies in humanities and social sciences in 2017, the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize of the German Studies Association 2017 for the best book in Holocaust Studies in 2015-2016, and was a finalist for the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research 2017.
Cosponsored by the Kutchin Seminar Series in the Jewish Studies Program, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Hebert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. For more information, Email: jsp-info@sas.upenn.edu or Call: 215-898-6654.
